Amon Düül II's follow-up to their landmark double-LP set Tanz der Lemminge features a musical approach less experimental than previous recordings, but nonetheless distinctive and broad-reaching in its sphere of influences. The almost epic tack of the earlier works has been pared down here, but full-forward, guitar-heavy tracks like "C.I.D. in Uruk," "Ballad of the Shimmering Sands," and "Kronwinkl 12" use disparate folk and hard rock elements cannily. The band moves the music with a majestic sweep punctuated by the snaky guitar work of Chris Karrer and John Weinzierl.

A curious release in the Amon Düül II catalog – originally it appeared only in Britain, and then as an astonishingly cheap budget release – Live in London is, unsurprisingly, exactly what it says it is. Recorded near the end of 1972, it features the full-band lineup performing songs mostly from Yeti and Tanz der Lemminge for a quite enthusiastic crowd (if prog rock bands performed for a bunch of stoned hippies, one would never know that from the cheers throughout). The group pours on the energy in turn; while they aren't simply playing at full blast throughout, the song selection and inspired performances are the mark of a band able to cut it just as well live as in the studio.

This is one great album, and one needn't be familiar with a single note ever played by Amon Düül, Amon Düül II, or any other German progressive rock band to enjoy it; indeed, this is the kind of album that fans of the Doors might honestly be said to have been wishing for. Stylistically there's not a lot in common between the two groups apart from some highly melodic guitar, some of it blues-derived (the Groundhogs' Tony McPhee is on the album, so you knew there'd be blues in there somewhere), and swirling organ and synthesizer arabesques, but one does get the real sense of this being a performance piece for poet and band, mostly courtesy of Robert Calvert.

Amon Düül II (or Amon Düül 2) is a German rock band. The group is generally considered to be one of the founders of the German rock music scene and a seminal influence on the development of Krautrock. The band emerged from the radical West German commune scene of the late 1960s, with others in the same commune including the future founders of the Baader-Meinhof Group (the Amon Düül II band members disagreed with their violent agenda). Founding members are Chris Karrer, Peter Leopold, Falk Rogner, John Weinzierl and Renate Knaup. Their first album Phallus Dei (God's Penis), released in 1969, is considered a milestone in German rock history.[citation needed] They received offers to write music for films, winning a German film award, the Deutscher Filmpreis, for their contribution to the film San Domingo. Their second album Yeti was their breakthrough album in the United Kingdom.[citation needed] In 1975, they signed with Atlantic Records, and disbanded in 1981. Wikipedia

Amon Düül ll's extraordinary 1973 album finds the influential German art rock band working surprisingly well in a short song format while still stamping the music with their unique sound. "Fly United," "Trap," and "Ladies Mimikry" show diverse styles of pop and rock running happily into each other with memorably quirky results. The instrumentation here is as quirky as ever,too – perhaps even more so than usual, with Chris Karrer's violin and sax playing now in the fore. The melodies are often shimmering. Unfortunately, the band never again sustained the excellence displayed on Viva la Trance again. ~Allmusic

The second Amon Düül album bore marked similarities to the first for very good reason – it too consisted of tracks recorded at the 1968 jam session which ended up being the bulk of the group's released work. Instead of longer tracks, Collapsing instead consisted of snippets or songs that were the length of more conventional pop recordings, while sounding nothing like said recordings at all. The same sense of "instantaneous taping and damn the fidelity" is here as well, though at times things are much crisper than might be expected, as the piercing two-note guitar riff on "Booster" demonstrates.

Surprisingly, the third Amon Düül album wasn't recorded at the jam session which produced the band's other major releases; even more surprisingly, Para Dieswärts sounded next to nothing like the other three. Out went the rough and ready drumming, stomping, and chanting; in went an extremely delicate sense of expansive songwriting, retaining the predilection for length (the shortest of the album's three songs was almost eight minutes long) but otherwise aiming at a new kind of tastefulness.

Posthumously released first in 1983, 'Experimente' offers up what I'm sure many of us hope to be the final leftovers from the groups famous 1968 jam session. In total, there are 24 tracks simply titled 'Special Track Experience'. Surprisingly, the material comprising 'Experimente' features slightly less percussion and is more coherent and interesting than any of the material on 'Disaster' or 'Collapsing'. Each of the 'Special Track Experience' tracks appears to be trimmed from a longer body of music, a trick that BASF should have considered before their release of the aptly titled 'Disaster'.

All great bands eventually reunite: and so it was, 14 years after their last, rather dull attempt at an album, the “original” line-up of “Amon Duul II” (with no Weinzierl who was off doing who knows what at this time) gets together to show the world they still have it nearly 30 years after their debut and 20 years after their last great album.

Some albums just have the perfect name, and Amon Duul's debut nails that to a T. Obscure upon release and obscure even now, for all the cult appeal, Underground is music at its most experimental and relentlessly uncommercial, using late-'60s inspirations as a launching ground for what came to be described as Krautrock. Psych-folk was another common term, one which applies just fine to much of the music here, feeling like an enthusiastic medieval festival gone just out of control enough, and with electricity to boot. Taken from a jam session from the previous year, but treated with many studio effects that enhance the strangeness of the collection, Underground rocks to its own weird beat.